Morphlabs' mCloud Rack Enterprise Merges the Best Hardware With the Best Software

The Register (News - Alert) refers to the new mCloud Rack Enterprise (very poetically) as a "cloud-in-a-box". Integrating the best and newest hardware innovations from world-class companies such as Dell (News - Alert), Arista and Nexenta, the new mCloud is an entree' made of only the finest ingredients available. The package uses Dell's C5220 processors, and stores data on 12TB disks that run storage software by Nexenta.

Beyond their classy taste in hardware components, another important aspect to Morphlabs' new system is that it utilizes OpenStack technology. OpenStack is a new species of software, originally pioneered by NASA and a company called Rackspace (News - Alert), for directing and organizing cloud-computing systems. They elected to make the project open source. Since its 2010 inception, over 159 companies have adopted it, including Morphlabs.

The Compute layer is where the majority of the processing occurs. It connects the servers themselves with the other two, more highly specialized layers in addition to handling routine maintenance required for involved RAM (News - Alert) and CPUs.

Object Storage co-ordinates and pools the capability and power from multiple, independently operating hard drives in order to make it available and usable as one unified resource. To ensure security, Object Storage intentionally creates processing redundancies. In the event that any one piece of hardware fails, the system can retrieve the same information from an alternate hardware source.

Finally, Image Service is the stuff that treats the whole, elaborately orchestrated process as a singular image of a machine. This is the level from which users update software versions and check against corruption as well as security failures.

Morphlabs even offers the first 14 days of specialized training in cloud computing solutions free of charge.